Comments

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The first is on an unexpected consequence of making academic life more family friendly. Here are the facts: woman get pregnant. Men don't. Moreover, child bearing comes at an awkward time in the academic life cycle (i.e. right before tenure decision time). US universities have accommodated to this by freezing tenure clocks for those choosing to start families, in effect allowing pregnancy to lengthen the tenure clock. The NYT's piece reports on a study seeing how this worked out. The results is that it made it favored men. The reason is that the leave rule was applied equally to men and women in a family allowing both to use the lengthening provision. Men were able to use this extra time more effectively than women to burnish their research records. The result: men gained disproportionately from the new liberal leave rule. The piece also discusses ways of "fixing" this, but all in all, the result is that things get complicated.

Here's my hunch: the problem arises because of how we insist on evaluating research. There is a kind of assumption that the bigger a CV the better it is. Line items matter a too much. More is better. This really does handicap those that hit a dry patch, and given the biology of families, this means that on average women will have a tougher time of it than men if this be the criteria. We need a rethink here. Simple things like quality not quantity might help. But I suspect a better measure will arise if we shift from maximizing to satisfying: what do we consider a good/reasonable publication record. In fact, might too much publication be as bad as too little? What marks a contribution and what is just academic paper churning?

The second piece is by Frans de Waal on whether animals think. There is a line of thought (I have heard it expressed by colleagues) that denies that animals think because they identify that with having linguistic capacity and animals don't have such. Hence they cannot think. This, btw, is a standard Cartesian trope as well; animals are machines bereft of res cogitates. De Waal begs to differ, as indeed does Jerry Fodor, who notes (quite rightly IMO) the following in LOT (1975):

‘The obvious (and I should have thought sufficient) refutation of the claim that natural languages are the medium of thought is that there are non-verbal organisms that think.’

Not only do animals think, they do so systematically. Of course, having linguistic capacity changes how you think. But then so does picking up a new word for something that you had no explicit word for. So, language affects thought, but being without language does not entail being thoughtless.

But this is not what I wanted to highlight in this piece. De Waal, one of the most important animal cognition people in the world, notes the obvious here concerning human linguistic capacity and its non continuity with what we find in animals:

You won’t often hear me say something like this, but I consider humans the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species.

In other words, nothing does language like we do. There is no qualitative analogue to human linguistic capacity in the rest of nature. Period.

De Waal, however, makes a second important observation. Despite this unique human talent, there are "pieces" of it in other parts of animal cognition.

But as with so many larger human phenomena, once we break it down into smaller pieces, some of these pieces can be found elsewhere. It is a procedure I have applied myself in my popular books about primate politics, culture, even morality. Critical pieces such as power alliances (politics) and the spreading of habits (culture), as well as empathy and fairness (morality), are detectable outside our species. The same holds for capacities underlying language.

There is a version of this observation that points to something like the Minimalist Program as an important project: find out which pieces are special to us that allow for our linguistic capacities and those that we share with other animals. Of course, the suggesting is that there will be pieces (or, if we are lucky, just one piece) that is special to us and that allows us to do linguistically what nothing else can. At any rate, De Waal is right: if one identifies the capacity for thought with the capacity for language then animals had better have (at least) rudimentary language. Of course, if we don't identify the two, as De Waal and Fodor urge, then there is nothing biologically untoward about one species of primate having a capacity unique among animals.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

While incommunicado, I read another article (here)
declaring the end of science as an institution, or at least declaring that it is
very corrupt, maybe irreparably so and that it is chock full of perverse
incentives that it would be amazing if anything at all got done right. I
confess that I am getting tired of these doom declarations and I suspect that
they are largely BS, though reflecting an importantly wrong view of inquiry
(see the end). Or, more accurately, I have no doubt that bad work gets done and
that scientists share the same character traits as other mortals and so are
influenced by the possibility of fame and fortune and that this influences how
they carry on their work, but, what I don’t see is any indication that we now
live in a fallen state and that once there was a golden age during which truth
and beauty alone motivated scientific inquiry. In other words, I have no reason
to think that the quality of work done today is any different than that done
before. There is just a lot more of it. Oddly, I think that the above could be
considered an idiosyncratic perspective.

The author of the linked to piece above, Jerome Ravetz,
thinks otherwise. He sees corruption and malpractice everywhere. He identifies
the problem as the rise of industrial science where “Gesellschaft” has replaced
“Gemeischaft” (love those German words; just what you need to add some
suggestion of depth) and quality control has disappeared. Couple this with a
very real job squeeze for scientists and “pathologies inevitably ensue,” most
particularly chasing “impact” displaces the “self-sacrificing quest for
scientific rigour.” This leads to “shoddy” and “sleazy” science where standards
have so “slipped” and basic skills so “atrohp[ied]” that most practitioners
don't know that their work is “sub-standard.” Wow! The end of the scientific
days! Sciencemageddon! What crap!!

Let me say why I can’t take this junk seriously anymore. Three
reasons:

First, the empirical basis of these analyses is that lots of
work in many domains don’t replicate. This is what John Ionnidis (see here)
showed a while back. Much work in biomedicine, social psych, and neuroscience
fails to replicate. Often the numbers cited are over 50% of this work. Ok, say
that this is so. What I have never heard is whether this is a big failure rate,
a low one or just par for the course. In other words, what should I expect the
non-replication rate to be a priori?
Should we expect science in general to run at an efficiency of better than 50%?
Maybe a success rate of 10% is unbelievably good (especially in domains where
we really don’t know much). I have heard that Ray Bradbury is reputed to have
said that 90% of everything is junk. If so, a 50% replication rate would be
amazing. So, absent specifying an expected base rate, these numbers really
don’t mean much. They should serve to
warn the uninitiated from taking every reported experiment at face value, but
for any working scientist, this should not be news.

Second, I see no evidence that things have gotten worse in
this regard. When I was a tot, I hazarded to read some of the earliest
proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science. This was fun stuff. Many reports
of odd creatures and other funny findings. In fact, aside from its
entertainment value, most of this is, from our point of view, junk.
Entertaining junk I grant you, but really not of current scientific value. My
suspicion is that the ration of important science and, ahem, questionable stuff
is always roughly as it was then, at least in many domains. The stuff that
survives and we covet is the smallest good bit sitting on a huge pile of
detritus. Maybe it takes lots of junk to make the good stuff (who knows). But,
I have seen nothing credibly arguing that today we produce more garbage than
yesteryear. But if the problem with science today is that it is science done today viz. big Gesselchaft science where
impact rather than truth is the lure then we should expect that all that ails
us once did not. Color me very very skeptical.

Third, I am pretty sure that lots of the shoddiness is
localized in particular areas. The logic of the modern decline should extend to
the successful sciences and not be limited to the aspirational domains. So, do
we have evidence that current practice in physics is shoddier? Do physicists
rush to publish shoddy work more now than they did? Does the regular experimental
submission to the Physical Review only
replicate at a rate of 50%? How about cell biology or molecular genetics or
chemistry? These are surely subject to the very same pressures as any other
domain of scientific inquiry and, moreover, we have ways of comparing what is
done now with what they did before because these fields have a before that we
can compare our decline with. I, at least, have not heard of these domains
suffering a replicability crisis. But if they are not, then it is very unlikely
that the generic incentives that the doomsayers like Ravetz like to point to
are really behind the problems in domains like social psych, neuro-science or
bio-medicine. Not that there isn’t a clear difference between the “real”
sciences and the ones most often criticized. There is, and here it is: we know
something in physics and chemistry and genetics and cell biology and we know
much less in the “crises” riven areas. We have real theories in physics and
genetics and cell biology, theories that tell us something about the basic
underlying mechanisms. This is not true in much of what we call “science”
today. The problem with the poorer performing areas is not that the
practitioners are shoddy or corrupt or venal or less skilled than their
predecessors. The problem is that we are still largely ignorant of the basic
lay of the causal land in these domains, and this is because we lack ideas not
methods.[1]
All of this brings me to my familiar refrain.

What really bugs me about this “end of science” doomology is
the presupposition that failure to gain insight must be due to failure to apply
the methods of inquiry correctly. The assumption is that there is such a method
and that the only reason that we are failing (if we are) is that we are not
applying it correctly. Given that the method is presupposed to be clear and
simple (as well as domain general) then the only reason that it is not being
applied right must be due to the personal failings of the investigators. They
whore after the wrong gods: fame, fortune, impact. But this presupposition is
poddle poop. There is no method and no mechanical recipe for inquiry that
guarantees success if only conscientiously applied. The idea that there could be one is one of the most baleful
legacies of Empiricism.

Empiricism is dedicated to the idea that what there is
largely reflects what you can see. It’s all there in front of view if only you
look carefully. There are no hidden forces or mechanisms. Empiricism is built
on a faith in shallow explanation reflecting a surfacy metaphysics.[2]
In such a world, the idea that there exists a Scientific Method makes sense, as
does the idea that failure to apply it must reflect some kind of pathology. If
you think that science is hard because it involves trying to locate hidden
structure that is only imperfectly reflected in what you can see
(experimentally or otherwise) then a high failure rate is to be expected until
you discover ways of thinking (theory) that tracks this underlying reality.
Only then might you be able to avoid being misled by what you see.

Let me finish with one more observation. Part of the
doomsaying has been prompted by scientific over reach (aka scientism).
Scientists love to preen that they are just motivated by the facts and not
swayed by vulgar conceptions the way regular folk are. Scientists are hard
headed and deserve respect, kudos, reward and deference because science has a
method to check itself and so when science speaks it’s not just opinion. In
other words, when it suits us, we scientists often trumpet the Scientific
Method to claim deference. It’s what makes us “experts” and expertise trumps
mere opinion. But if there is no Scientific Method then there is no expertise
in virtue of having been produced by such a method. There is expertise, but it
must be harder won and it is very limited. If this is right, then there is a
lot less science out there than is advertised, and a lot less expertise than generally
claimed. And that suits me just fine. That’s a doomsday I can both live with
and rejoice in. That, however, has nothing to do with the status of actual
scientific inquiry. It’s doing no worse than before, muddling along and saddled
with all the problems it has always had.

[1]
Though, this said, does anyone think that bio-medicine has made no progress?
Would you rather give up modern methods for those from 1990, or 1950, or 1920?
I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t. This would suggest that despite all the
problems, at least in bio-medicine, we have learned something useful, even if
many basic mechanisms are opaque.

[2]
I stole “shallow explanation” from Chomsky who used this in another (related)
context.

Monday, June 20, 2016

So what’s classical (viz. GB) Case Theory (CCT) a theory of?
Hint: it’s not primarily about overt morphological case, though given some
ancillary assumptions, it can be (and has been) extended to cover standard
instances of morphological case in some languages. Nonetheless, as originally
proposed by Jean Roger Vergnaud (JRV), it has nothing whatsoever to do with
overt case. Rather, it is a theory of (some of) the filters proposed in
“Filters and Control” by Chomsky and Lasnik (F&C).

What do the F&C filters do? They track the distribution
of overt nominal expressions. (Overt) D/NPs are licit in some configurations
and not in others. For example, they shun the subject positions of non-finite
clauses (modulo ECM), they don’t like being complement to Ns or As, nor
complements to passivized verbs. JRV’s proposal, outlined in his famous letter
to Chomsky and Lasnik, is that it is possible to simplify the F&C theory if
we reanalyze the key filters as case effects; specifically if we assume that
nominals need case and that certain heads assign case to nominals in their
immediate vicinity. Note, that JRV understood the kind of case he was proposing
to be quite abstract. It was certainly not something evident from the surface
morphology of a language. How do I know? Because F&C filters, and hence
JRV’s CCT, was used to explain the distribution of all nominals in English and
French and these two languages display very little overt morphology on most
nominals. Thus, if CCT was to
supplant filters (which was the intent) then the case at issue had to be
abstract. The upshot: CCT always trucked in abstract
case.

So what about morphologically overt case? Well, CCT can
accommodate it if we add the assumption that abstract case, which applies
universally to all nominals in all Gs to regulate their distribution, is morphologically
expressed in some Gs (a standard GG maneuver). Do this and abstract case can
serve as the basis of a theory of overt morphological case. But, and this is
critical, the assumption that the mapping from abstract to concrete case can be
phonetically pretty transparent is not a central feature of the CCT.[1]

I rehearse this history because it strikes me that lots of
discussion of case nowadays thinks that CCT is a theory of the distribution of
morphological case marking on nominals. Thus, it is generally assumed that a
key component of CCT assigns nominative case to nominals in finite subject
positions and accusative to those in object slots etc. From early on, many
observed that this simple morphological mapping paradigm is hardly universal.
This has led many to conclude that CCT must be wrong. However, this only
follows if this is what CCT was a theory of, which, I noted above, it was not.

Moreover, and this is quite interesting actually, so far as
I can tell the new case theorists (the ones that reject the CCT) have little to
say about the topic CCT or C&F’s filters tried to address. Thus, for
example, Marantz’s theory of dependent case (aimed at explaining the
morphology) is weak on the distribution of overt nominals. This suggests that
CCT and the newer Morphological Case Theory (MCT) are in complimentary
distribution: what the former takes as its subject matter and what the latter
takes as its subject matter fail to overlap. Thus, at least in principle, there
is room for both accounts; both a theory of abstract case (CCT) and a theory of
morphological case (MCT). The best theory, of course, would be one in which
both types of case are accommodated in a single theory (this is what the
extension of the CCT to morphology hoped to achieve). However, were these two
different, though partially related systems this would be an acceptable result
for many purposes.[2]

Let’s return to the F&C filters and the CCT for a
moment. What theoretically motivated
them? We know what domain of data they concerned themselves with (the
distribution of overt nominal).[3]
But why have any filters at all?

F&C was part of the larger theoretical project of
simplifying transformations. In fact, it was part of the move from construction
based G rules to rules like move alpha (MA). Pre MA, transformations were
morpheme sensitive and construction specific. We had rules like relative clause
formation and passive and question formation. These rules applied to factored
strings which met the rules’ structural conditions (SD). The rules applied to these
strings to execute structural changes (SC). The rules applied cyclically, could
be optional or obligatory and could be ordered wrt one another (see here
for some toy illustrations). The theoretical simplification of the
transformational component was the main theoretical
research project from the mid 1970s to the early-mid 1980s. The simplification
amounted to factoring out the construction specificity of earlier rules,
thereby isolating the fundamental displacement (aka, movement) property. MA is
the result. It is the classical movement transformations shorn of their
specificity. In technical terms, MA is a transformation without specified SDs
or SCs. It is a very very simple operation and was a big step towards the merge
based conception of structure and movement that many adopt today.

How were filters and CCT part of this theoretical program?
Simplifying transformations by eliminating SDs and SCs makes it impossible to
treat transformations as obligatory. What would it mean to say that a rule like
MA is obligatory? Obliged to do what
exactly?So adopting MA means having
optional movement transformations. But optional movement of anything anywhere
(which is what MA allows) means wildly overgenerating. To regulate this
overgeneration without SDs and SCs requires something like filters. Those in
F&C regulated the distribution of nominals in the context of a theory in
which MA could freely move them around (or not!). Filters make sure that these
vacate the wrong places and end up in the right ones. You don’t move for case strictly speaking. Rather the G
allows free movement (it’s not for
anything as there are no SDs that can enforce movement) but penalizes
structures that have nominals in the wrong places. In effect, we move the power
of SDs and SCs from the movement rules themselves and put them into the
filters. F&C (and CCT which rationalized them) outline one type of filter,
Rizzi’s criterial conditions provide another variety. Theoretically, the cost
of simplifying the rules is adding the filters.[4]

So, we moved from complex to simple rules at the price of Gs
with filters of various sorts. Why was this a step forward? Two reasons.

First, MA lies behind Chomsky’s unification of Ross’s
Islands via Subjacency Theory (ST) (and, IMO, is a crucial step in the
development of trace theory and the ECP). Let me elaborate. Once we reduce
movement to its essentials, as MA does, then it is natural to investigate the
properties of movement as such,
properties like island sensitivity (a.o.). Thus, ‘On Wh Movement’ (OWM) demonstrates
that MA as such respects islands. Or,
to put this another way, ST is not construction specific. It applies to all movement dependencies regardless of
the specific features being related. Or, MA serves to define what a movement
dependency is and ST regulates this operation regardless of the interpretive
ends the operation serves, be it focus or topic, or questions, or
relativization or clefts or… If MA is involved, islands are respected. Or, ST
is a property of MA per se, not the
specific constructions MA can be “part” of.[5]

Second, by factoring out MA form movement transformations
and replacing SDs/SCs with filters focuses on the question of where these
filters come from? Are they universal (part of FL/UG) or language specific? One
of the nice features of CCT was that it had the feel of a (potential) FL/UG
principle. CCT Case was abstract. The relations were local (government). Gs as
diverse as those found in English, French, Icelandic and Chinese looked like
they respected these principles (more or less). Moreover, were CCT right, then it did not look like easily learnable given
that it was empirically motivated by negative
data. So, simplifying the rules of G led to the discovery of plausible universal
features of FL/UG. Or, more cautiously, it led to an interesting research
program: looking for plausible universal filters on simple rules of derivation.[6]

What should we make of all of this today in a more
minimalist setting? Well, so far as I can tell, the data that motivated the
F&C filters and the CCT, as well as the theoretical motivation of
simplifying G operations, is still with us. If this is so, then some residue of
the CCT reflects properties of FL/UG. And this generates a minimalist question:
Is CCT linguistically proprietary? Why Case features at all? How, if at all, is
abstract case related to (abstract?) agreement? What is anything relates CCT
and MTC? How is case discharged in a model without the government relation? How
is case related to other G operations? Etc. You know the drill.[7]
IMO, we have made some progress on some of these questions (e.g. treating case
as a by product of Merge/Agree) and no progress on others (e.g. why there is
case at all).[8]
However, I believe research has been hindered, in part, by forgetting what CCT
was a theory of and why it was such a big step forward.

Before ending, let me mention one more property of abstract
case. In minimalist settings abstract case freezes movement. Or, more
correctly, in some theories case marking a nominal makes it ineligible for
further movement. This “principle” is a reinvention of the old GB observation
that well formed chains have one case (marked on the head of the chain) and one
theta role (marked on the foot). If this is on the right track (which it might
not be) the relevant case here is abstract. So, for example, a quirky subject
in a finite subject position in a language like Icelandic can no more raise
than can a nominative marked subject. If we take the quirky case marked subject
to be abstractly case marked in the same way as the nominative is, then this follows
smoothly. Wrt abstract case (i.e. ignoring the morphology) both structures are
the same. To repeat, so far as I know, this application of abstract case was
not a feature of CCT.

To end: I am regularly told that CCT is dead, and maybe it
is. But the arguments generally brought forward in obituary seem to me to be at
right angles to what CCT intended to explain. What might be true is that extensions of CCT to include
morphological case need re-thinking. But the original motivation seems intact
and, frow what I can tell, something like CCT is the only theory around to account for these classical data.[9]
And this is important. For if this is right, then minimalists need to do some
hard thinking in order to integrate the CCT into a more friendly setting.

[1]
Nor, as I recall, did people think that it was likely to be true. It was
understood pretty early on that inherent/quirky case (I actually still don’t
understand the difference, btw) does not transparently reflect the abstract
case assigned. Indeed, the recognized difference between structural case and
inherent case signaled early on that whatever abstract case was
morphologically, it was not something easily read off the surface.

[2]
Indeed, Distributed Morphology might be the form that such a hybrid theory
might take.

[3]
Actually, there was a debate about whether only overt nominal were relevant.
Lasnik had a great argument suggesting that A’-traces also need case marking.
Here is the relevant data point: * The man1 (who/that) it was
believed t1 to be smart. Why is this relative clause unacceptable
even if we don’t pronounce the complementizer? Answer: the A’-t needs case.
This, to my knowledge, is the only data against the idea that case exclusively
regulates the distribution of overt nominal expressions. Let me know if there
are others out there.

[4]
Well, if you care about overgeneration. If you don’t, then you can do without
filters or CCT.

[5]
Whether this is an inherent property of movement rather than, say, overt
movement, was widely investigated in the 1980s. As you all know, Huang argued
that ST is better viewed as an SS filter rather than part of the definition of
MA.

[6]
I should add, that IMO, this project was tremendously successful and paved the
way for the Minimalist Program.

[7]
The two most recent posts (here
and here)
discuss some of these issues.

[8]
Curiously, the idea that case and agreement are effectively the same thing was
not part of CCT. This proposal is a minimalist one. It’s theoretical motivation
is twofold: first to try to reduce case and agreement to a common “mystery,”
one being better than two. Second, because if case is a feature of nominals
then probes are not the sole locus of uninterpretable features. Case is the
quintessential uninterpretable feature. CCT understood it to be a property of
nominals. This sits uncomfortably with a probe/goal theory in which all
uninterpretable features are located in probes (e.g. phase heads). One way to
get around this problem is to treat case as by-products of the “real” agreement
operation initiated by the probe.

From
what I gather, the idea that case reduces to agreement is currently considered
untenable. This does not bother me in the least given my general unhappiness
with probe/goal theories. But this is a topic for another discussion.

[9]
Reducing nominal distribution to syntactic selection is not a theory as the relevant features are
almost always diacritical.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Here are two articles on modern academic life that might
interest you.

The
first is on grad student unionization. I have heard many people argue that
grad student unions would severely negatively affect the mentor-mentee relation
that lies at the heart of grad education. How? By setting up an adversarial
relationship between the two mediated by a bureaucracy (the union) whose
interest is not fully in line with that of the grad student. I have never been
moved by this, but I have been moved by the observation that grad student life
if currently pretty hard with a less than stellar prospect of landing a job at
the end (see here
for some discussion). The piece I link to goes over these arguments in some
detail. His conclusion is that the objections are largely bad. However, even
where it true that grad student unions would change the prof-student mentoring
relationship, it is not clear to me that this would not be a cost worth
bearing. Grad students are in an extremely exploitable position. This is when
unions make sense.

The
second piece is about how the composition of university personnel has
changed over the last several years. If confirms the observation that tenure
track faculty has shrunk and that part-time faculty has risen. But, it notes
that the problem is likely not the
growth in admin people or other non-prof personnel. It seems that this group
has stayed relatively stable. This said, the paper does not investigate funding
issues (are non-profs sucking up more of the money than the used to?) nor does
it discuss how much money at universities is now being diverted from the core
missions of teaching and research to the “entertainment” part of current
university life (i.e. new gym facilities, art centers, fancy dorms, support staff
for entrepreneurship, etc.). Here is the conclusion. I will keep my eye out for
the promised sequel.

The results of this
analysis suggest that the share of employees at colleges who are administrators
has not been much higher in recent years than it was in 1987. There has been
growth, though, in the other professionals employment category. This growth is potentially
related to a growth of amenities and other programs outside of the teaching and
research that have been the traditional focus of colleges and universities,
although this is difficult to ascertain due to the broad nature of this
category. An additional result in the analysis is that the share of faculty who
are full-time employees has been declining. This decline has occurred within
the public sector, the private sector, and the for-profit sector.

One
limitation of the analysis here is that it considers only employment and not
spending on salaries, amenities, or anything else. However, I plan to address
spending by colleges and universities in a future Economic Commentary.